Recent years have seen disturbing increases in domestic burglaries in the United States and other countries. As more and more homes are burglarized, the public in general has become more conscious of providing physical security for their homes and other buildings. The rapid increase in the number of households in which both husband and wife hold full-time jobs has led to an increase in the opportunities for burglars.
In recent years, electronic security devices have become increasingly popular. However, such security devices tend to be relatively expensive and often require expert installation. Many such arrangements include a contract basis with the company providing the security equipment when such equipment includes apparatus for automatically dialing a home office of the leasing company. Such devices can be either silent alarms, which require a quick response on the part of the local police force, or audible alarms which attempt to frighten the intruder away.
Though such alarms can be very effective, they are, as noted above, somewhat expensive. Furthermore, they tend to be failure prone in the sense that a significance number of false alarms are provided by many such systems. Also, some sophisticated burglars who are after a particular type of goods within the home can break and enter, quickly steal the goods which they seek such as silverware and jewelry, and exit the home prior to the response time of the combination of security equipment provider and local police.
Other physical devices have been provided in the prior art, the main purpose of which is to prevent physical entry into the premises rather than detect same or cause audible alarms upon the occurrence of a break-in. The most popular form of such devices are items traditionally referred to as "burglar bars" or "burglar screens". Such devices are known to be effective for restricting unauthorized entry into a dwelling. However, burglar bars and burglar screens have several drawbacks. First and foremost is the fact that, irrespective of attempts to fabricate burglar bars somewhat inexpensively and make them decorative in appearance, many people consider such devices to be extremely unattractive. Thus, conventional burglar bars and burglar screens are aesthetically displeasing to many people who will often forego use of such devices in favor of maintaining what they believe is a suitable appearance for their home.
A second and related factor to the aesthetic problem with burglar bars and burglar screens is the fact that they give many people the feeling that they are resident in a prison or a fortress of some type. This will also lead many people to forego the use of such devices.
A more significant problem arises when one considers the extent to which people are actually imprisoned by burglar bars and burglar screens in the event of an emergency such as a fire within the dwelling to which they are attached. In order for these devices to be effective, it is necessary for them to be tightly and firmly secured to the outer portions of a window frame or the siding of the home. Needless to say, in the event of an emergency, opening them can be quite difficult. While a number of burglar screens are conventionally attached in a hinged fashion, with padlocks being used to secure the screen at one or more locations, working with a padlock in the event of an emergency is much more cumbersome than working with a fixed window locking device.
Also, there are a number of prior art schemes for locking windows. Many people have used rubber tipped lever arrangements similar in principle to a knock-down door stop. Such a device has a spring-loaded arm secured to the top of the check rail of a bottom sash of a single or double hung window. The rubber foot at the distal end of the arm engages the vertical portions of the upper sash and, by friction, prevents the window from being raised. However, this type of device falls into the class of window locking arrangements which may be defeated once a section of glass from a window is broken.
Thus, in the prior art there has been a conflict between a person's desire to have an aesthetically pleasing window as a part of a home or other building and the extent to which the window may be physically secured to physically prevent the entry of a burglar through it.